Muldoon Feature

Rex Painter and Dorothy Povey’s Idaho's Bonanza Years: Ghost Towns, Their History and How to Find Them serves as both a pioneer chronicle and a physical navigational guide to the abandoned mining settlements scattered across the Gem State. The narrative maps the rugged, isolated topography that dictated Idaho's late-nineteenth-century mineral rushes, tracing routes through the steep, timbered gulches of the central Salmon River Mountains southward to the arid, high-elevation basins of the Owyhee range. By detailing the rapid rise and inevitable collapse of these remote boomtowns—often built precariously along narrow canyon walls and deep within unforgiving alpine valleys—the authors illustrate the extreme environmental challenges prospectors faced in extracting wealth from the state's formidable interior. Ultimately, the text captures the transient geographical footprint of resource extraction in the inland Pacific Northwest, demonstrating how the harsh physical realities of these isolated mountainous enclaves eventually reclaimed the ambitious pioneer architecture of Idaho's gold and silver rushes.

46 pages illustrations, map 25 cm